Tragic Boating Accident

We didn’t really participate in the hippie “lights-out” or the backlash “lights-on” movement this weekend. Instead, we attended an event that celebrated the gentle spirit and ample bounty of Mother Gaia… and the 440 Chrysler big-block:

Just this one show put enough CO2 into the air to keep us warm-weather enthusiasts happy for years. Most of the cars were wedge-head 440s, but there was one Hemi Charger there. I didn’t get a picture of it because the nice owner was taking people for rides and the car was in and out of the show pretty fast each time. Whenever that one came back into the parking lot, you’d think that they were raising Old Glory at a Lee Greenwood concert; everyone stood to attention and let the big-lobed-cam awesomeness wash over them.

I also spotted a Citroen 2CV on the road next to the show. How many 2CV’s would it take to equal the power of one mighty 426? (The 2CV probably isn’t over 40 HP at the crank, but the Hemi… well, the stock power is the subject of some debate. Let’s just call it 10 2CVs and call it a day.)

And I got a nice pic of another reminder of our Mother’s peaceful healing spirit:

To paraphrase the apocryphal quote, the Ma Deuce is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Crew-served machine-guns and Hemis = full of win.

Sounds low to me, but here it is:

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Online Dating

The quiz doesn’t ask how much water you have stored, which is what separates the men from the long pig.

Monty Python > Nostradamus.

I’m So Worried by the Pythons

I’m so worried about what’s happenin’ today, in the middle east, you know;
And I’m worried about the baggage retrieval system they’ve got at Heathrow;
I’m so worried about the fashions today, I don’t think they’re good for your feet;
And I’m so worried about the shows on TV that sometimes they want to repeat.

The prediction about the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow > prediction about Hister.

Some posts recently on a couple of the blogs I read started me to thinking: What’s the WORST popular book I’ve ever read?

Hmm. Red Rabbit and Bear and the Dragon by Tom Clancy come immediately to mind. Like pretty much everybody else who reads any modern fiction, I thought that The Hunt For Red October was excellent, and I generally enjoyed, to various degrees, the first few of Clancy’s books. But both Red Rabbit and Bear were painful to finish. The prose is so horribly stilted; the dialogue wildly improbable. I avoided Teeth of the Tiger just out of self-defense. But those two pale in comparison in sheer awfulness to one book that so inexplicably suceeded in the marketplace:

Left Behind, by LaHaye and Jenkins.

This book has, as of this writing, 2,169 reviews at Amazon, and it has an average rating of four out of five stars - a “very good” average. This book is set in the can’t-miss-for-plot-twist post-”rapture” world that some believe will precede the return of Christ.

This book is so bad, it killed the dinosaurs.

As a literary device, the sudden absence of a large segment Earth’s population is hard to beat. What, besides stealing their plasma set and bass boat, would you do if your neighbors suddenly vanished without explanation? What if most of the neighborhood was gone? Hard to tell a bad story there, eh? Stephen King managed a whopper of a story with the flawed-but-enjoyable The Stand. ANYBODY can turn “The Rapture” into something readable, right?

How wrong you are, bucko. Our 10 year-old is fond of making up stories to tell our 5 year-old, and his short on-the-way-to-grandmother’s-house tales have better character development and more realistic dialogue than does Left Behind. The disappearance of a sizable chunk of the population is treated with the gravity of a trip to the grocery store. To say that the characters are one-dimensional would be an insult to Euclid, and Cop Rock had a more coherent value system.

A friend of mine who knows of my affiinity for post-apocalyptic fiction gave me this book, unread, on the theory that the book fit that genre. Although I (barely) finished Red Rabbit and Bear and the Dragon, I am unashamed to say that I simply could not finish Left Behind. It is the only book in recent memory that I have actually thrown away rather than donate to Goodwill or some similar charity; indeed, I would be embarrassed for a burglar to find this on my bookshelf.

I believe it to be the worst book I have ever attempted to read, yet this book sold millions of copies. How, I have no idea. I’ve more than once read the Bible front to back in a couple of editions, I took an entire year of formal and fairly rigorous Bible study at a religious school, I paid attention in Sunday School (sometimes), and like many reviewers, I wonder how you can turn the beautiful prose and promise of the Bible into this dreck. It’s like reverse alchemy: turning gold into tin.

If there were a way to sort all Amazon book reviews to exclude reviews by anyone who gave this book more than a single star, I would do so. One of the one-star reviews appropriately quotes Dorothy Parker:

This is not a book to be set aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

This morning, a friend gave me a copy of The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper.

I’ve searched my memory and I don’t believe that I’ve ever actually read this. (Insert laugh track here…) My preference for self-directed reading in fiction was always sci-fi, and this is one of the (too many) classics that escaped me.

As I get older, I have less and less interest in any kind of fiction that they sell at Sam’s Club, and I’m making an effort to do right by myself by filling in the gaps on the “Stuff Everyone Ought To Have Read” list before I need the large print editions. I also notice that the reviews at Amazon for Mohicans are unusually thoughtful and insightful by comparison to, say, your average Stephen King review (I enjoy King, mostly, this is not a dig at him). A better class of bookworm?

I’ve heard Nimoy sing before, but never this song. You know, it’s the ancient Geek argument, quien es mas macho, Star Trek or Lord of the Rings? (LOTR FTW; Trek is a grossly overrated guilty pleasure.) Here is the worst of both worlds. “‘Things You Don’t Want To Send To Space On Voyager’ for $1,000, Alex!”

Ballad of Bilbo Baggins by Leonard Nimoy:

CNN always does SUCH a good job with firearms stories… sigh.
Smugglers’ deadly cargo: Cop-killing guns

Granted, when someone from da government tells a reporter something, he is wont to repeat it.

Still:

In Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, a police commander was gunned down in front of his home. The weapon used to kill Cmdr. Francisco Ledesma Salazar is believed to have been a .50-caliber rifle. The guns are illegal to purchase in Mexico but can be obtained just north of the border at gun shows and gun shops in the United States.

Oh teh noes, gun shows. I am a regular attendee at some of the biggest gun shows in the south and southwest, including Dallas Market Hall and the big Wanenmacher show in Tulsa. I’ve been attending these shows for nearly two decades now. I have NEVER seen a private sale .50 BMG. There are plenty to be had if you fill out a 4473… but then it wouldn’t matter if you bought it at a dreaded gun show, eh?

The weapon fires palm-sized .50-caliber rounds that can cut through just about anything.

It’s an eighty-eight magnum! It shoots through schools! It can shoot down a plane - or a satellite!

Mangan showed CNN the power of the rifle on a gun range near Phoenix, Arizona. The weapon, a Barrett, was seized in an ATF raid. A round fired from 100 yards away tore through a car door and both sides of a bulletproof vest like those used by Mexican police.

Here’s a clue: A .308 or .30-06 can also shoot through a car door and a Level IIIA vest. First they came for the .50, but I didn’t speak up because I didn’t own a .50…

One recent seizure in a Yuma, Arizona, storage locker yielded 42 weapons and hundreds of rounds of .50-caliber bullets already belted to be fed into a machine gun-style weapon.

Sounds like a nice trip to the range. You can make a Venn diagram with this information: Group A - people who think 42 guns is a bunch; Group B - people who think 42 guns is just a good start. And the hundreds of rounds of .50 on belts… that’s some shiny ammo in the picture at the linked story. Hmm. Don’t really know its origin, but (click click Google) even Sportsman’s Guide has linked .50 (they say: “[N]ot intended for bolt or semiauto rifles”) from time to time. If anyone is suggesting that the cartels are getting Ma Deuces from gun shows in the USA… well, that’s a gun show I want to know more about.

The guns confiscated included AK-47 rifles and dozens of Fabrique National pistols. The semiautomatic pistols fire a 5.7-by-28 millimeter round, which is technically a rifle round, according to the ATF. Newell says the round has a special nickname in Mexico. “It’s called ‘mata policias,’ or ‘cop killer,’ ” he says.

Oh, the deadly 5.7. Apart from the will-never-die Glock 7, there are more firearms myths about the 5.7 than any other round. Truth: The commercially available 5.7 ammo will not reliably penetrate Level IIIA armor, especially when fired from a handgun. FN says so (PDF link), and the ATF agrees. However, lots of other small arms will penetrate this same armor. Also, a human shot with the 5.7 is more likely to survive the wound than a human shot with a common .30-30 hunting rifle, or with a .223 from an AR pistol, or a 7.62×39, or etc, etc, ad nauseum. The Mexican police should be happy that their opponents are only armed with 5.7s and not something more substantial.

Officer Cesar Quitana patrols a dangerous barrio in Juarez, Mexico. He is armed with an M16 assault rifle — a weapon that would be no match in a gunfight with drug lords.

“I think most of us feel scared just to bring this with us,” he says, pointing to the rifle in the front seat of his patrol car. “But this is what we use to defend ourselves.”

This is simply absurd. What in the name of Eugene Stoner are you talking about? Other than making it shorter (ala M4) to make it easier to maneuver into and out of a vehicle, that’s a fine choice for an individual officer faced with this kind of threat. This has become too silly.

Now, I’ve noticed a tendency for this programme to get rather silly. Now I do my best to keep things moving along, but I’m not having things getting silly.

Dan “D.B.” Cooper, where are you?

Allergy season.

If I actually tear my eyes out of their sockets, the pain will only be temporary, right?

Does anyone know the LD50 for Benadryl? I have already found the dose for “puts me in a fog and makes me unable to understand anything on my desk besides the Cheetos package.”

Our local fish wrapper has an editorial generally discussing Heller and it’s potential impact on Louisiana. The piece discusses the NRA ratings of our various LA politicians:

Sen. David Vitter, R-Metairie, and Reps. Jim McCrery, R-Shreveport, Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, Rodney Alexander, R-Quitman, Charles Boustany, R-Lafayette, and former Rep. Richard Baker, R-Baton Rouge, all received an A from the NRA.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-New Orleans, received a C-minus. Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans, was the only member of the delegation to receive a failing grade of F.

Hmm. In 2004, as the popularly-known “assault weapons ban” was set to expire, I sent letters to, among other people, Jim McCrery & Mary Landrieu. My letters were almost identical and asked the lawmakers to vote against the renewal of the ban should one be introduced. I got a page-long response from Sen. Landrieu that was so strongly pro-gun that it could have been written by someone from the NRA. At least someone on the Senator’s staff was deeply familiar with the issues involved and the letter pointedly said that the Senator respected the individual rights of citizens to keep and bear arms and that the Senator would vote against any effort to renew the ban.

The letter I received from Rep. McCrery’s office, on the other hand… That response was comprised of two paragraphs, the first of which said something like “there is little gun legislation currently before this Congress” and the second of which said that Rep. McCrery had voted in favor of the renewal of the “plastic gun ban,” protecting us all from terrorists armed with the Glock 7 and other imaginary weapons. The author - and it was “signed” by Rep. McCrery, so the buck stops there - demonstrated NO familiarity with the possibility of the renewal of the AWB, which at the time was much in the news.

I guess these ratings are based on something (although they did give Ron Paul a ratings-credibility-destroying “B”), but in this case, the “C-” lawmaker was spot on whereas the “A” lawmaker was without a clue… on one of the edgier gun issues in modern times. McCrery is retiring soon, and I will be working to evolve our “A” rated rep into an “A+” rated rep who understands the issues and whose staff understands the issues.

(Sen. Vitter, despite his personal failings, has proven to be a superb Senator - probably the best ever from Louisiana - and well-deserves his NRA “A.” I still don’t believe that he should be a Senator - but while in office, he has voted just as I would have done and has actively worked to reform the ATF.)